A Nice Guy Tries to Finish First : Baseball: Manager Jeff Torborg is making friends along the way as he tries to lift the Chicago White Sox to the American League West Division title.

Jeff Torborg is not so much the manager of the White Sox as he is their father figure. The man talks about family values and togetherness as readily as he does his pitching rotation. He permits wives and girlfriends on the team’s charter flights. He greets sportswriters by inquiring about their family. He is Fred MacMurray in a dugout.

“This is a great bunch of guys,” Torborg said. “That’s what we want. We moved some people who didn’t fit with our team-slash-family here.”

You wouldn’t be surprised to find the Torborg family dog curled up on the carpet of the manager’s office. Indeed, there was Brandy, a female golden retriever, wagging her tail in Torborg’s office at Yankee Stadium Wednesday while the Sox lost their first game of the season, 10-1. Brandy then boarded the team bus with the White Sox and then their chartered plane to Chicago.

Brandy and the Sox were going home for the first time this season. The Sox endured a 10-day, three-city trip with a 6-1 record. The grind finally caught up with them Wednesday. They looked like a tired team. Thursday, amid the pageantry of an air show by F-15 and F-16 jets, they open the new Comiskey Park.

“It’s about time we go home,” said Alex Fernandez, the losing pitcher. “It’s been long days on the road after a long spring training. I think the guys are really looking forward to going home and being able to unpack our bags for the first time in a month and a half.”

Perhaps Torborg will arrange for them to have warm milk and cookies upon their arrival. By just about everybody’s account, Torborg, 49, is one of the nicest persons in baseball. He also has shown himself to be one of the sharpest managers.

His team is 100-69 the past two years, including 55-31 in games decided by one or two runs -- just the sort of games in which a manager is tested. Not bad for somebody Billy Martin once said “couldn’t get a job in Egypt.”

“He said that about me and Sammy Ellis,” Torborg said. Ellis is now his pitching coach. “We used to joke after that about trying to get a job with the Cairo Pharaohs.”

You look at Torborg turning around the White Sox and Lou Piniella molding the Reds into world champions and wonder how the Yankees could have let both get away. Torborg spent 10 years as a coach with the Yankees. When his seven-year contract expired after the 1988 season, Dallas Green told him he didn’t need him as coach. Green said something about being an advance scout. That’s when the White Sox stepped in and hired him as manager.

George Steinbrenner employed Torborg as a bullpen coach, a pitching coach and a first base coach. He gave Torborg a seven-year contract when Torborg was ready to take a job coaching Princeton University. He gave Seattle permission to talk to Torborg in 1984, but then refused to let Torborg out of his contract when the Mariners decided on him as their manager. Steinbrenner even offered Torborg the general manager’s job in 1982. (He turned it down.) But Steinbrenner never made him one of his 11 managers. Just as well. Torborg is an intelligent man. He probably would have turned down that opportunity, too.

“I never was interested in managing here,” he said. “I didn’t want to. This is the most difficult job in our game.”

So Torborg survived quietly through 10 of the most tumultuous years in Yankee history. He served Martin under the Billy II, III, IV and V regimes. They never got along very well. Martin hated Torborg because Torborg had this strange notion that after games he should go home instead of to bars. He also distrusted Torborg because Torborg had security with that long-term contract. “He thought I was the pipeline upstairs,” Torborg said.

Their relationship wasn’t helped when Steinbrenner planted a story with Howard Cosell that Martin would be fired and that Torborg would be named manager.

“I came in one Saturday and people were asking me about it.” Torborg said. “I didn’t know anything about it. I asked Howard about it later on and he said he had dinner with George the night before and George said he was going to do it. He had just fired (pitching coach) Art Fowler and he was trying to get Billy to quit.”

It was the closest Torborg ever came to managing the Yankees, though you could fill Yankee Stadium with all the managers George rumored to be on the way. Now the Yankees are a last-place outfit, inevitable victims of the slash-and-burn mentality of people such as Steinbrenner and Martin, and Torborg is winning enough in Chicago to make you think nice guys can finish first.

Ask him why he enjoys managing the Sox when he didn’t want the same job in New York and he says, “The ownership is great, the front office is great, the players are great, the fans are great ... The whole thing is just nice.”

Torborg has found his place. He knew it wouldn’t be in the Bronx. One afternoon in 1988, Torborg was driving to work when he saw Clete Boyer, one of Martin’s coaches, driving the other way. Something is wrong, he thought. It turned out to be another of the Yankees’ comings and goings. Martin had been fired. It would turn out to be the last time Martin managed. Torborg, though he and Martin never were close friends, took the time to telephone him and say how sorry he was.

“Later on,” Torborg said, “Billy said I was the only guy who called him after he was fired.”